About Paul.
Paul Radford is a senior full-stack engineer who turns ideas into working software. For more than twenty years he has done the unglamorous, essential work of understanding what people actually need and building it, drawing on a career that spans not just the full web stack but the businesses around it. That instinct for translation, taking a vague ambition and shaping it into something that ships and scales, runs through everything from early custom CRM builds to enterprise platforms handling hundreds of millions in transactions.
More recently his focus has moved to AI. He has led LLM adoption across his current company, building custom Model Context Protocol integrations into its software so that customer-service, product, engineering, and DevOps teams work with less friction. It is the practical, often awkward production work between a model and the people relying on it: LLM integrations and agentic workflows, grounded in two decades of full-stack engineering across PHP, Laravel, React, Next.js, PostgreSQL, and AWS.
That AI work sits on a deep technical foundation. As a senior full-stack engineer he has rebuilt underperforming legacy systems into scalable platforms, modernised codebases serving hundreds of thousands of users, and bridged the gap between security, operations, and development teams on the infrastructure that ships a product. Alongside the day job he builds his own tools, including a visual firewall-rule designer and a Bun-first backend framework. Paul is based in Victoria, Australia, and works with teams worldwide.
Where I've worked.
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Senior Full-Stack Engineer · a workforce-management SaaS
Bridging security, operations, and development, and leading LLM and Model Context Protocol adoption across the product.
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Senior Software Developer · a national telco
Rebuilt CRM and external-API performance, and built the platform that supported a major merger across VoIP, NBN, and mobile services.
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Lead Developer · a digital agency
Rebuilt underperforming legacy applications into scalable platforms, and led a shared-hosting-to-AWS migration backed by Elasticsearch and Redis.
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A decade-plus of PHP & full-stack work
Hands-on PHP, LAMP, and front-end development across agencies and small businesses, including custom CRM and web-systems builds.
Building right now.
RuleForge
Firewall configuration is unforgiving: rules are dense text, ordering bugs are easy to introduce and hard to spot, and one mistake can expose or black-hole a network. RuleForge turns that text into a visual canvas — drag out the network topology, compose rules against it, and simulate how a packet traverses the rule set before anything ships. Complex policies become legible at a glance, mistakes surface in the simulator instead of in production, and the gap between intent and configuration narrows. Currently in private beta.
Bunary
Bun makes JavaScript backends far faster to start and run, but the ecosystem still lacks the batteries-included structure that makes a framework like Laravel productive for real applications. Bunary brings that structure to Bun — a cohesive, convention-driven backend framework built around Bun's strengths, optimised for developer velocity and minimal cold starts rather than retrofitting a Node-era framework. The result is an open-source foundation for building scalable, high-performance APIs with the ergonomics developers expect and the speed Bun provides. Built in the open.
template.tips
Practical front-end knowledge — the small CSS and HTML techniques that actually ship features — is scattered across blog posts, threads, and gists, and goes stale quickly. template.tips collects them into one maintained library: a React front end backed by a headless Payload CMS, curated and updated weekly so the snippets stay current and copy-paste ready. The result is a growing, practical reference for developers who want a working technique rather than a long article.
aitool.tips
AI tooling moves fast, and the genuinely useful prompts, tips, and workflows are buried in noise that's outdated within weeks. aitool.tips curates them into a maintained library — the same React and headless Payload CMS stack as template.tips — focused on practical, current techniques for developers working with AI tools day to day. The result is a growing reference of AI tips and prompts that stays current, helping developers get more from the tools without wading through hype. Updated weekly.